Here's SFU historian of mathematics and AI, Stephanie Dick.

I can talk about this maybe most concretely in terms of mutually assured destruction.

You won't bomb me because I'll bomb you, and neither of us can handle the consequences of that.

But in practice, mutually assured destruction is really complicated.

[laughs] If you are going to reliably retaliate against a nuclear attack, you have to either know that it's going to happen or be able to respond after it happens.

You need to know where all of your enemy's nuclear resources are so that you can monitor them and be able to give an order to retaliate after you've been struck, which means you need communications infrastructure in place.

You need military decision-making in place.

And so what happens to our understanding of intelligence over time? Well, the risk is that we think intelligence should be frictionless, that it should answer quickly, that it should accommodate endlessly and rarely push back.

What, what drew you to the occult as a lens for sort of understanding computing, and what does that reveal, um, the purely technical history would miss?

miss?So this project really started for me when I was reading the letters, the archival letters of, uh, one of the twentieth century's most important logicians, Kurt Gödel, who immigrated from Hungary and was based at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

And I learned from those letters that Kurt Gödel had been reading Carl Jung, who is one of the most important students of Sigmund Freud and one of the most important psychoanalysts of the twentieth century.

And Gödel was getting really interested in some of the occult ideas that Jung was interested in, including this idea that Jung has of what he called synchronicity, which was the idea that our state of mind, the state of mind of, of a person might actually shape the outcome of events in the world in ways that we don't have a good scientific explanation for and that look like occult phenomena.

And Gödel very famously has other interests in the occult.

He writes about ghosts in the context of the twentieth century and, and certain other sort of mystical phenomena.

And this led me to a really interesting question, which is, you know, what does this central thinker about formalization and deduction and mathematical proof and certainty and their limitations, what role does the occult play in his understanding of the human condition? And so to make a long story short, I went along my way reading Gödel's letters and then reading some of this surrounding texts of Jung's and many others.

And, uh, these machines obviously are good at collecting our data, hopefully at some point, and then, you know, mimic the pattern, right? They could, we could just escalate, right? We do more, it, it does more, right? So at what point, or m-more kind of intrinsically, what is the kind of the search process of the meaning truly belong to human in a sense that it cannot be mimicked by any other intelligence? Or maybe that could, it just we don't know yet.

It's a game, a test of sorts, for determining whether something is a, a machine or a human being.

Was based on a parlor game for swapping gender that says a man and a woman leave the room, and the partygoers have to figure out who's the man and who's the woman by sending questions back and forth on paper.

And the man's job is to try to pretend to be the woman, and the woman's job is to be herself.

And he says, "What if we took the same test and replaced the man by a computer and the woman by any person?" And then the judge, of course, is meant to be able to figure out whether the machine is the human or the human is the human.

And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing test is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie, to putting on the performance of being something that you're not.

From the beginning with this disembodied conception of intelligence, the question that Turing posed, what can the mind do without a body, and therefore what might the machine do since it doesn't have one, chess was one of the first answers given.

So, um, it, it, it was a clear sign for me that the history of us competing with machines will be over soon.

There's a lovely article that comes out in The New York Times in the wake of Kasparov losing that says, "Well, it makes sense that the computer won at chess.